Sunday, March 25, 2012

Suburban Boston. A good community. Good schools. Good
parenting. Good kids?

Eighth-grader Ben Rifkin is found dead with stab
wounds in a Newton, Mass., park by a jogger. Prosecutor Andy Barbour starts to
investigate the case and finds a likely suspect, an unregistered pedophile
living nearby. Facebook rumors by Ben’s classmates find another --- Andy’s son
Jacob.

So the top-notch prosecutor is taken off the case and
becomes a primal defender as father in Defending
Jacob, William Landay’s courtroom thriller.Andy Barber maintains his unwavering belief in Jacob despite discovering
how little he knows about his son.

He’s not the only one. Ben’s father, Dan just can’t
understand why anyone would kill Ben: “Ben was so good. That’s the first thing. Of course no kid deserves this
anyway. I know that. But Ben really was a good boy. He was so good. And just a kid. He was fourteen years old, for God’s
sake.”

Fourteen – a perfect age for these troubled characters.
Fourteen’s an age when even “normal” kids aren’t normal, an age when parents often
haven’t caught up yet. They’re still thinking of their sons and daughters as innocent
children while the teens are discovering who they are by bullying others and
being bullied, hanging out in Facebook, and lurking about in internet chat rooms. Kids keep secrets and emergent personality traits
well hidden from their parents; the parents wouldn’t recognize Ben or Jacob from
teenage peer descriptions.

Nor, in this book, does anyone know the parents. Andy
Barber has kept an ancestral and childhood secret from his son and his wife,
Laurie, whom he met in college. The male
side of his family has a history of violence and murder. A murder gene? His
explanation for the omission -- after the first intimate disclosures of
identity when Andy told Laurie he didn’t really know his father, there was
never a good time to tell.

Furthermore, Andy’s such a good guy himself. As the
book opens he is testifying before the grand jury 14 months after the murder
because he says, he believes in the system (which he then tell us “isn’t
exactly true).” This grand jury testimony
threads throughout Andy’s narrative of the murder, Jacob’s trial and the
aftermath. The reader doesn’t know why
Andy has voluntarily taken the stand or what this investigation is about until
the final pages. All we know is he is being questioned by Neal Logiduce,a prosecutor he trained, the prosecutor who
replaced him, the man who prosecuted Jacob.

In the grand jury investigation Logiduce uses Andy’s good
graces against him: “Your honor, we all know and have fond feelings for the
defendant’s father, who is in the courtroom today. I personally have known this
man. Respected and admired him. I have great affection for this man, and
compassion, as we all do, I’m sure. Always the smartest man in the room. Things
came so easily to him. But. But.”

While the judge immediately intervenes, reminding
everyone Andy is not on trial, that’s only half true. His family has been under
siege since Jacob became a suspect.Author Landay hones in on how quickly “our crowd,” a klatch of upper
middle class, well-educated, concerned parents, recoils from the accused’s
family. Graffiti, offensive phone calls, and a lurking individual in a car
haunt the Barbers. Grocery store outings become occasions for painful
encounters.Laurie takes it the hardest,
growing haggard, losing her circle of support, obsessively reviewing all of
Jacob’s childhood behaviors, allowing doubt to creep in.

Andy
simply doesn’t go there. “He isn’t guilty. I know my son. I love my son,” he
states and restates in as many ways as possible. He privately pursues the
pedophile, making chilling discoveries that the single-minded Logiduce has
ignored.

The
reader seesaws with the arguments from belief to disbelief, questioning, along
with the characters,arguments of nature
and nurture, the significance of DNA evidence that shows agene for violence, andthe possibility of “confirmation bias,” the
human tendency to believe what one wants to believe.The implications of such new discoveries in
genetics, neuroscience and psychology on the justice system play out in fictive
form. Ultimately the reader questions that system itself, both its basic belief
in free will and the fallibility of the way it works.Andy tells us: “Here is the dirty little
secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone
imagines… Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical
thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to
it.”

What’s
the reader to believe? Unconsciously, from the start we believe our
storyteller. We have little choice but to see the world as he sees it. As filter, as guide, his point of view is ours.
Like a child, we trust in him. While some
of his actions may make us cringe, we take in his explanations and accept them until
--- until we don’t.

The
rebellious reader may break away from this smart, domineering father, this experienced
pattern maker. For this reader that disillusionment happened close to the
book’s brilliant end – the final page of a series of endings.

When the grand jury testimony ultimately merges with
and takes over the main plot, what is revealed is a verbal battle between two
lawyers that has the power to destroy one or both. While references are made to Columbine, the
denouement also suggests similarities to another recent high-profile case in
which a representative of the legal system’s son was accused of murder. Perhaps
William Landay, a former district attorney himself, wondered what it would be
like to be in such a position and to get inside the head of such a character.

What
is true for this reader at least is that Landay is good.His skill with character, dialogue, family
dynamics, plot and intrigue makes Defending
Jacob a good read.

His
ending makes it even better -- what my Maine friends would call wicked good.

Why I chose this book:I grew up
in a suburb neighboring Newton, still have some connections to the area and was
intrigued by the setting.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes is no pot boiler; it’s a solidly written pressure
cooker.

Another
in the slew of newly translated Scandinavian mysteries, this Danish police
procedural features a mismatched crime-solving duo, the hardboiled, irritating Carl
Morck and his charming assistant, Middle Eastern motley fool, Assad. While Carl is abrasive as sand paper, Assad
can be as pleasingly smooth as massage oil. Their interaction provides much
needed comic relief to the building tension, long- term torture, and considerations
of suicide the plot comprises.

The prelude presents
a glimpse of the main plot: a caged
woman who doesn’t know where she is or what she has done to get herself in the
box she’s in.

The story then cuts to 2007 when Carl has been
promoted to the basement. No one wants to work with the surly, depressed Danish
detective so his boss, Marcus Jacobsen, creates a department just for him
coinciding with the legislature’s newly allocated funds for working on cold
cases --- a sum that far exceeds what Carl will use. It’s a no-lose situation: It isolates Carl and the extra money from
Department Q will spill over to Jacobsen allowing him to hire four new
investigative teams (to replace Carl’s one former team). Plus it gives Carl recovery time; he is
suffering following an assault that left one of his partners dead, another
paralyzed and him traumatized with survivor’s
guilt. The assault occurred as part of an investigation of a murder by nail gun,
another case that remains unsolved.

Carl defiantly basks in his solitude, passing the time
lazing away, playing Spider Solitaire, solving Sudoku puzzles and counting, but
not opening, case files. But when he gets
wind of the way the funding works, he can’t resist a counter move. He demands a
car, and an assistant. They assign him Assad and the fun begins. Carl has to
find something for Assad to do. Assad proves more than the tidy janitor,
careening chauffeur, strong coffee maker, cheerful gopher and secretary charmer
that he first appears to be. He wheedles
Carl back to work.

Almost haphazardly Department Q settles on the case of
Merete Lynggaard, a beautiful, mysterious former member of parliament, who
disappeared while travelling on a ferry five years ago.She was with her disabled brother Uffe, who
has lasting brain injuries from a family car accident. Merete, is believed to
have drowned. Perhaps she was pushed or jumped from the ferry. Her body was
never found. The reader, of course knows otherwise; she is the woman in the
cage.

At first the cold case seems impossible to crack; old
leads go nowhere. Slowly, slyly, Assad turns up a few promising threads and
Carl engages. Tension builds. Merete fights her captivity with all she’s got
left –her will to live for Uffe.
Carlvisits Uffe, interviewshis former caretaker, Merete’s former secretaries,even a former wannabe boyfriend.Carl uncovers a botched initial investigation
and follows his instincts. Assad, like a magicianpulling a rabbit out of a hat, finds a long
lost briefcase seemingly out of thin air. Back at the cage, the torturer cranks up the
pressure.

Will Carl and Assad find Merete in time to save her?

While the story cuts back and forth from the cage to
the crime solvers, two subplots also emerge with parallel pressure, suicide and survivor issues
of the main plot. The first is the crime that made Carl a basket case at the
book’s beginning.Carl feels compelled
to visit his paralyzed partner, Hardy Hennigsen in the rehabilitation hospital and
do what he can for him. In addition, the
nail gun case has developments reinforcing his trauma. While Merete may feel pressure from without
while imprisoned in a cage, Carl feels parallel pressure from within his
ribcage; he suffers panic attacks.

Subplot number two involves the murder that the teams
upstairs are working on with sporadic small successes due to either casual
comments tossed them by Carl or outright consultation with him. They can’t work
with him and they don’t work without him. The case, involving a murdered
bicyclist and a witness to the murder, also includes themes of suicide, sacrifice/responsibility
for others and pressure.

It’s the interplay of the characters and themes more than
red herrings or twists of plot that make this mystery interesting.Curiously, a few characters are introduced
including a live-in stepson and an estranged wife and hardly used and some
crimes go unsolved. Perhaps these
relationships and crimes will be further explored in future books.

Some, like me, may put together the reason for the kidnapping
long before the kidnapper is cornered by Carl and Assad. And even as the plot
simmers, the pressure cranks and the case heats up, the reader has a pretty
good guess as to the inevitable end, by virtue of structure alone.

That structure, seesawing back and forth between the
cage and the crime solvers, lends itself to easy transformation into a
screenplay. Perhaps Jussi Adler-Olsen
had such a transformation in mind as he wrote. But if that screenplay were to become a movie,
the interaction of crime solvers would likely be critical to its success – just
as it is in the book. While the cagedwoman and her torturer provide terror, Carl
and Assad are a comedy act and an investigative team to be reckoned with.